There was nothing in the fridge except a carton of milk and some oranges. He searched through the cupboards but found nothing much there, either, and when he turned around Angie had dozed off again on the pillow. Her face wasn’t the calm face of a person asleep, it was troubled and unhappy, fighting bad dreams. Seymour went back across the alley to Thelma’s house. He took a can of tomato soup and some slices of bread from the kitchen, hoping their absence wouldn’t be noticed, and returned to Angie’s place. The soup turned lumpy because the only saucepan he could find to cook it in had an uneven base, but he toasted the bread under the griller and arranged everything neatly on the tray. Angie woke up—or perhaps she hadn’t really been asleep at all behind that restless face—and tried to eat the lunch he’d prepared, but left most of it on the tray.

‘You’re still shivering,’ Seymour said. ‘Thelma’s got a hot-water bottle in her laundry. Want me to go over and get it?’

‘Geeze, you’re sweet,’ Angie said huskily, gazing at him over the lunch she hadn’t eaten. ‘No, I don’t want a hot-water bottle, but thanks anyhow, pal. You’re looking after me as though I’m your own mum or something like that…’

‘My mother never stays in bed when she gets sick,’ Seymour said and thought of her, sharp and slim as a needle, darting through his life. ‘She just takes an Aspro and keeps going. She reckons everything would fall apart in our family if it wasn’t for her,’ he added, unsure if it were something to be proud of or otherwise, and thinking it had all fallen apart, anyway, in spite of her taut, brittle energy.

‘Well, I guess she wouldn’t approve of me, then, slouching around like this. I’ll have to pull my socks up a bit when I have…Jas and me are going to get married just as soon as things work out, and you never know, I just might have a kid straight off. Sooner than I planned, even, with my rotten luck. What do you think about that, me being a mum? Freaky, isn’t it, the whole idea? Still, you can be its uncle if you like. I mean if it even happens.’